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Press Mentions

Ad Age: Why So Many Media Companies Stumble GloballyThe few news brands that have succeeded, to greater or lesser degrees, arguably include CNN, Bloomberg, People, Thomson Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Financial Times and The Economist. Other contenders are the Associated Press, the BBC, ABC, NBC, maybe CBS, National Public Radio, News Corp. and the top U.K. dailies, said Ken Doctor, the newspaper veteran who's now an analyst at Outsell. "If a news-media organization sees itself as covering the wider world, sees it as its foundation, that in and of itself differentiates it from all the local media -- newspapers, TV, radio -- out there," he said. "If, in addition, it has substantial reporting and editing resources, then it can play. The tough part is the part we're in: Who wins the race to ubiquity and can make it pay off?"

NYT: If The Globe Were Sold, What Price? “The best guesstimate of the real price: a buck. The best of an announced price: between $50 and $100 million,” he wrote in an e-mail message. The devil will be in the details of the obligations that a buyer would assume, he said, adding that “a buck essentially represents a gentleman’s agreement: I take a liability, headache and a distraction off your hands.”
He said that the Times Company could hang on to some pension liabilities or other obligations in exchange for a higher purchase price, a number that would give the appearance that it was getting something for the more than $1 billion it paid 16 years ago. He added that no bank would be interested in financing a deal given how other deals have blown up, so “the owner’s own money is immediately at risk.”

BizTimes.com: Journal Sentinel faces daunting choices“There’s no strategy – this is panic. What we’re likely to see this year (around the country) and what we’ll see in Milwaukee too is (publishers asking) how much they need to cut back and how much they can do to still hold their place in the market. For publishers, it’s about ‘How do we stay alive and stay profitable until we can get to some sort of breathing period?’ (Economic) recovery will not bring back their old business, but it will give them some breathing room.”

AP: Threat to shut Boston Globe shows no paper is safThe threat to close the paper "sends a very clear message to all employees and unions of surviving newspapers — that this is not business as usual. This is uncharted territory....Newspapers all "have a sword over their heads," said Doctor. If the industry wants to survive, he said, "everyone has to give some blood."

I found 1Cast in my ambling around the
News section of the iTunes Apps store.

It’s a remarkably simple idea – and one
that many a news company should be thumping its head about: why didn’t we think
of that?!?

1Cast – now available for the iPhone and
Android, and coming soon, I believe, for the Blackberry – answers an old
question in a new way: “What’s On?” And then makes coverage easy to share on Facebook, Digg, delicious, StumbleUpon, reddit or by e-mail.

What’s on in this case is news, glorious,
up-to-the-minute news. So far, most major producers of news video have signed
on, willing to take a budding ad revenue share, as usage increases.

Among the news sources:AP,
Bloomberg, CNBC, Reuters, and the Dow Jones brands – WSJ, Barrons, Marketwatch
and AllThingsD from the US; CBC,
from Canada; BBC
from UK andAFP
from Europe.

Anthony
Bontrager, 1Cast’s president, tells me more (national and local broadcast) sources
will be announced within a couple of weeks and then still more as the company –
started stealth in 2006 – comes formally out of beta in August.

The
iPhone experience is intuitive. First screen: top headlines. For the last couple of weeks, you could click on
Iran Protests and get more than a half dozen up-to-date (and in this
case we’re dealing with 24/7, follow-the-sun coverage) video segments. The Iran coverage
answers the question on many of our minds: What the hell is happening in
Tehran, best as the constrained global news sources can tell us, with pirated
video and voiceovers. At our fingertips.

You
can pick and choose your way through top stories, or pick by news network or do
some initial customization and favoriting. Bontrager says that the sports
channel will soon be joined by others, like business, lifestyle, music and
comedy.

When
I ask him who the competition is, he tells me that only Veoh and Hulu approach as
competitors. They’re not really direct competitors of course, because they
don’t concentrate on news video. Hulu, a smart if nascent aggregation play, of
News Corp, NBC Universal and, soon, Disney, plays itself as a YouTube counterweight, and
is still searching for a business model meaty enough to sustain three
sharp-elbowed media heavyweights. Those owners produce lots of news, but Hulu considers “news” as a subset channel of entertainment, one of 18 channels on the site.

Veoh, Truveo, Blinkx and YouTube itself, offer lots of news video, but finding
it is a crazy-making exercise, mixed among much amateur video, job training
sessions and dancing iguanas.

1Cast
“was born of frustration,” says Bontrager, an IPTV telco veteran. “How can we
get the information we want? We saw news to be an underserved market.”

Wow.
News people talk endlessly about glut and commoditization, and here’s a telco
guy talking about “under-served markets.” Talk about a disconnect.

June 24, 2009

Pocantico once
served as one of the Rockefellers’ family estates. Stately, 45 minutes north of
Manhattan, it speaks to the wealth of an earlier industrial era.The
Rockefellers, of course, built their fortunes on oil, but their brethren, like
the Hearsts and the Pulitzers built them on paper and ink. The kinship is
palpable as we move into the era of digital publishing and renewable energy.

Indeed, renewing energy is a part of what will be happening
at Pocantico next Monday and Tuesday. Spurred on by the foundations that are starting to pour money into them,
a group of some 30 pixel-stained wretches will meet to plot a new course and a new network.

"Creating the Investigative News Network" is the objective, and the session's goals and participants are clearly laid out at watchdogsatpocantico. Pocantico only sleeps 30, and that determined the number of participants. Those participants range from top national and regional investigative organizations to city start-ups (Saint Louis Beacon, MinnPost, Voice of San Diego) to newspapers (Sacramento Bee) to public broadcasting (NPR, WNET) to phenomenon of the year, Huffington Post. Expect more players to join the action after the initial conference.

The conclave is unprecedented, and its goals ambitious. I could also say timely, but that is obvious. Enough people have been screaming "Press Emergency!" that some people with money have listened.

Earlier this month, the J-Lab, Jan Schaffer’s Knight Foundation-funded project computed how much money has flowed into journalism from foundations. The total was surprising: $128 million in grants have been
awarded to at least 115 news projects in 17 states and the District of
Columbia, from the beginning of 2005 through mid-2009. Its searchable database, which allows you to drill down into funders and grant recipients, is accessible.

A few high points from that survey give us the context for the Pocantico conference:

*
Of the 115 projects getting funding, 102 of them went to organizations that
have launched within the last four years.

*
The largest share, $65 million, went to “investigative” projects. Of that
amount, $56 million went to the “big 3'' investigative organizations, the Center for Investigative Reporting, the Center for Public
Integrity and ProPublica, all of whom are key Pocantico players.

Two of the those three, the East Coast-based Center for Public Integrity and the West Coast-based Center for Investigative Report (CIR), did most of the organizing of the meeting.

"Foundations want us to collaborate and cooperate," Robert Rosenthal, late of the Philadelphia Inquirer and the San Francisco Chronicle,
and now head of the OaklandBerkeley-based CIR told me. Certainly, many of the participants know each other and do cooperate, sharing tips, resources and databases. They haven't, though, organized themselves into an ongoing sharing network, one that can multiply the value of that widening foundation pipeline. One of the first pieces moving into place came with last week's announcement that AP will distribute the work of four of these investigative groups throughout its network. That's a first step in the six-month experimental distribution. What must follow, I believe, is solid monetization of this high-quality content, and that means testing sponsorship, ad and syndication models -- so that foundation funding isn't the only source of revenue going forward.

The potential Pocantico outcomes, according to the organizers: "Syndication, collaboration, cooperation, our own website." Rockefeller Brothers Fund's Ben Shute helped convince the organizations it was time to take their work to a new level. Rockefeller, the Surdna Foundation and the William Penn Foundation funded the meeting.

Co-organizer Bill Buzenberg, now director of the Washington,
D.C.-based, Center for Public Integrity, brings a lot of relevant and unique experience to the group. He's a public radio guy who has both NPR and American Public Media experience. APM is a master syndicator, and NPR has endured the travails of national/local networking, still looking for a suitable model.

$128 million is a significant number – but it may be just a
drop in the bucket of what’s to come.

So take the Pocantico gathering as an indication that foundations will play a major role in the next chapter of American journalism, especially local journalism.

Sources tell me that major foundations –
some that have previously considered “news and information” to be fairly far
afield from their philanthropic mandates – are now talking about the large sums of
money that may be needed to fill the gaps left by cratering dailies in big
metro markets.

Yes, it’s hard for civic supporters not to notice the cave-ins
and the emerging impact it’s having on the civic conversation. In the Bay Area,
Hearst threatened to close the Chronicle and the MediaNews’ 30 papers have
seen their staffs and papers drastically, all to stave off the bankruptcy woes that
have afflicted six other news companies recently.In Chicago, both
the big dailies are in bankruptcy.In Philadelphia, the two dailies, owned by one bankrupt owner, paw for a
future.

So, yes, it’s becoming clear to foundations that “news and
information “ – don’t call it journalism –
may no longer be a market-sustaining product, but one, like the arts,
health and education, needing foundation support.

These big foundations are meeting and beginning to ask the
important questions. How do we support and enable larger-scale newsgathering
and distribution – in the dozens, if not hundreds, of staffers?The Voices, MinnPosts, Beacons and
others have proven out smaller
propositions, organizations of six to 12 staffers, editor-heavy with
stipend-paid reporters, bloggers and columnists. Good stuff, and a tonic as the
big table has been emptied of sustenance. But, small stuff, compared to what’s being lost in newsgathering and
reporting. You can’t empty newsrooms of hundreds of people and expect these
small start-ups to fill the void. The entrepreneurs running these sites
are the first to tell you that.

So Pocantico marks another step into terra incognita. The foundations are properly concerned that the start-ups are heavy on
journalistic fervor and light on business modeling and networking skills.How to work better work together, learn
together and grow together, is, accordingly, a key goal of the conference -- and must to-do coming out of it. Cooperativeness is good; high-level business savvy must be a next step.

It's no longer a matter of just doing good work. This is "replacement journalism." Half the foundation money has gone to the "watchdogs," and indeed they need to be fed. We know, though, that good, old-fashioned local reporting -- call it investigative or call it "beat" -- needs to replaced. Pocantico is a step in that replacement, as experimentation grows into significant and sustainable news operations able to replace what's been lost, and, of course, able to harness the multimedia tools of the day.

It’s ferment all around these days. The watchdogs
meet at Pocantico. Newspaper CEOs fly into for a Chicago airport conclave. AP
and others try to up the ante in their Google negotiations. “Paid content”
advocates put on their own roadshows to sign up beleaguered publishers for new
initiatives and platforms.

June 14, 2009

The New York Times' David Carr asked six analysts one of the questions of the moment: just how much is the Boston Globe worth?

I liked how Fitch's Mike Simonton suggested that "buyer" may be a misnomer; "assumer of costs" might be truer.

Carr
also reminds us that Jack Welch's indicated that he might be willing to
round up some $500 million or so to buy the Globe just three years ago.
2006, though, now seems like another lifetime in the newspaper
industry. How the Times could have used that kind of money to do battle with Rupert.

So, this week, as we try
to separate the potential buyers from those who may just delight at
seeing those books (how much of the $85 million in annual Globe "loss"
is operating loss and how much "other"?, for instance), I'll
amplify on my remarks to Carr.

Given the state of the world,
the ad market, the newspaper market and vagaries of the online future,
my best guesstimate of a price: a buck.

A buck essentially
represents a gentleman’s agreement: I take a liability, headache and a
distraction off your hands, says the buyer. I give you the great
potential of the Globe brand, a top 25 news web site and improved
ability to re-jigger the pieces, thanks to our new contracts and
cost-cutting, says the Times.

A buck recognizes that there is
so much unknown and such unchartable risk and reward here that only a
token payment can even it out for both sides.

The Times gets
shortchanged. It paid $1.1 billion for the paper just 16 years ago.
It’s struggled to keep the Globe staffed through bad economic times.
It’s subsidized losses.

The new owner takes on great risk.
It's highly unlikely any bank will finance a purchase, given the
half-dozen bankruptcies we've seen over the last year in the industry.
That means the new owner’s own money is immediately at risk. The new
owner starts out behind, even with recent contract givebacks, given the
trajectory of operating loss and a continuing 30% decline in year-over-year advertising revenue. Forget the purchase price; how many millions
will I have to sink in within the next year?

The potential upsides include buying an ad-based franchise at the bottom of
a recession and being able to be a shiny newly painted boat in a rising
economic sea; 2010 ad numbers can hardly help to be an improvement
over this year’s. The feds will soon be paying people to buy cars, and
houses will start to sell again; related advertising will recover a
bit. 2010, I'm coming to believe, will offer a breather to the
beleaguered industry. Yes, the structural changes of ad spending and
reading will continue, but a small ad bounce will help dramatically
downsized companies in the next calendar year. That may only stop the
gasping temporarily, but breath is breath.

The potential
downsides include inheriting a heavy-on-cost business model at a time
when competitors from Huffington Post to Politico to local start-ups to
emerging online initiatives of local broadcasters threaten to do
further damage to daily newspapers. In the fact, the new business
models we're seeing from the start-ups -- small, editor-heavy, full-time
staffs, growing legions of part-time reporters, columnists and
bloggers, regional aggregation models -- stand far distant from the
model of a paper like the Globe. If you truly believe that Boston needs
a vibrant, public service-oriented news source, is assuming Globe
ownership the place you want to start?

June 10, 2009

Mad Avenue Blues is a satire for our times, this discontented summer, this seeming nadir of media fortunes. Set to Don McLean's "American Pie," it's brilliant, wholly watchable for its full 9:21 run. It's done by the pseudonymic "LMcDuff08," who has a YouTube page with other satires. As John Battelle has suggested, watch it several times to get all the jokes.

"Oh and there we were all in one place. Our business models lost in space."

Mainly, it focuses on the cratering of the old ad world, and on network TV. Newspapers have a nice, supporting role with such lines as:

"I asked the man who ran the Times about turning dollars into digital dimes. But he just frowned and walked away....I went down to the corner store where I'd bought the broadsheet years before. But the man just said the paper didn't pay."

So "if algorithms got you cross-eyed" and "the digital revolution has taken you for a ride," enjoy and pass along.

June 09, 2009

Entrepreneurs Mark and Gary Stern announced today that, within 60 days, Detroiters will once again be able to get a newspaper delivered to their door seven days a week, though it will have neither the Detroit Free Press nor Detroit News name attached to it. The Sterns certainly have a mountain to climb to achieve the break-even, 150,000 circulation model they've set out as the goal.

The fact that the Stern brothers are even trying is what bears notice. It parallels a launch of another kind, a coast away. In March, Barbara Bry and Neil Senturia, wife and husband entrepreneurs, launched the San Diego News Network.

Yes, SDNN is an online site, while the Detroit Daily Press is a print product, with some secondary digital presence to come. Both, though, point to an emerging reality: The rapid shrinking of daily newspaper companies is beginning to leave vacuums in local markets and marketplaces. Entrepreneurs are assessing those gaps and moving to create products that will work -- profitably. Expect these announcement to only accelerate as we see an economic recovery take hold.

There's an irony in that, of course. Daily newspaper publishers have been making the point that the new economics of the news business simply won't pay for business (and staff and product) as usual. They are right, of course -- given their economics, but not necessarily the next guy's.

June 08, 2009

Things are turning ugly. Globe staffers up the ante in Boston. John Carroll calls Sam Zell an idiot. Online ads on newspaper sites drop to double-digit negatives. Which leaves me, as we approach this summer of our discontent, with more questions than answers. Here's Nine:

1. Down the road, will the Globe Guild members like their new owners better than the New York Times Company? Certainly, the Globe's sense of loss is understandable -- and real. Still, it's intriguing to compare the Globe Guild's rejection of the Times' offer to the Portland Guild's recent partnering with venture capitalists to take Maine Newspapers down a new road. The Maine Guild accepted givebacks to get the deal done, and to get a share of the company. My sense: It's always easier to be enthusiastic about the new, unknown guys than the management you've dealt with for years, even it is the New York Times.

2. Where will lenders -- the new owners-to-be of bankrupt newspapers like the Tribune and the Inquirer -- turn for new leadership? They've got old-time publishers to choose from -- lots of them in the market -- as they replace the entrepreneurs like Sam Zell and Brian Tierney who fatally entered the trade in the last several years. They've got broadcast people, borrowing a page from Zell's playbook, as inevitably newspaper and local broadcast operations do grow together. They've got their pick of ad veterans, if they smartly see that local media success is going to be dependent on inventing scalable digital businesses.

3a. Won't Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal's okay of Tribune's merged TV/newspaper operations in Hartford seem quaint fairly soon? Sure, the FCC-related value of diverse community voices is a good idea. Going forward, though, the divide between local news video and local story/blog writing creation is an artificial one. Bottom line: The marketplace will probably take care of local news diversity rather than the increasingly outmoded rules of Old Media.

3b. Aren't we finally able to put a pricetag on Sam Zell's unwarranted optimism and hubris? It looks like his $250 million "loan" to Tribune will be wiped out in the bankruptcy, as will his $90 million warrant. Still, it's just pin money for the guy who sold his real estate investment trust for $36 billion in 2006 and knows enough -- endowing the Zell Center for Risk Research at Northwestern -- to make judicious bets.

4. While the San Diego News Network (Chris Jennewein's new hangout) is hardly a commercial threat yet in San Diego, the cratering of the Union-Tribune -- a one-time employer of 1422 people that will soon be paying only 572 850 -- leads to this question, in San Diego and elsewhere: How big a marketplace hole does a disappearing daily leave in its wake? My guess is that with an economic recovery, we'll see lots of small-shop entrepreneurs aiming to pick up local merchant dollars now in flux.

5. Why would anyone expect the Kindle to "save" newspapers when it hardly supports advertising and takes 70% of subscription revenue?